January 2012 Newsletter (PDF)

Volume 12, Issue 1

January 2012

AIMS Times
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S P E C I A L
P O I N T S O F
I N T E R E S T :

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Career Profile:
Getting Science
to those who
need it pp 4-5

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Parents Corner:
About Parent
Involvement in
Education pg. 5

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Schedule at a
Glance pg. 6

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D I R E C T O R ’ S

Happy New Year!!!
(Sparkling Grape Juice
in Glass)

Director’s Chair

1

Shout Out from the Office
Staff

1

Coordinators’ Corners

2

Career Profile

3

Parents Corner

5

I am blessed to be able
to live another year
surrounded by loved
ones such as you! I
hope each of you had a
wonderful holiday break
and are now
rejuvenated and excited

S H O U T

Happy New Year to All!!!
6

Birthdays

6

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We are all fortunate to have
made it to yet another year
and with that in mind
remember the 4's: GOD,
Family, Friends, & Health.
With these four elements in

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C H A I R

I hope that each of you
has started the New
Year off on the right
foot (so to speak)! This
year we have some
exciting educational
and cultural activities
planned for you. Make
sure to check the
calendar for all of the
upcoming events! If
you know of any
students who are
interested in joining the

O U T

Hi Everyone,

Schedule At a Glance

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about what 2012 has in
store! For the first time
in many years, I
actually wrote the
correct year when
writing a check at the
grocery store the first
week of 2012! Must be
a good omen!

Dr. Doris Sarr, Director
AIMS I & AIMS II

I N S I D E T H I S
I S S U E :

S

AIMS Family, please let
us know! We would be
happy to speak with
them and get them
information on the
program.
Take care! I look
forward to seeing many
of you at some of the
upcoming workshops
and cultural outings!

Yours in Education,

Doris

F R O M T H E
S T A F F

your life, you will be able to
achieve your dreams &
wishes.
Dr. Sarr, Stephen Keene,
Evan O'Neal, and myself are
here to help you succeed so
with that in mind work hard
and dream big!

O F F I C E

Best wishes to everyone for
the New Year!

Gail Woolridge

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A I M S

C O O R D I N A T O R ’ S
Happy New Year!!!!
2012 is off to a great start
and we are full speed ahead
in the AIMS Office preparing
for several exciting events
and activities! I hope your
new year is off to a good start
as well and you are making
plans to attend the many
special events and cultural
outings we have planned. I
also hope your are continuing
to excel in school and are
preparing yourself for our
exciting summer component!
I believe that last semester
may have been one of the
strongest I have seen out of

the AIMS Program since I
have been employed! It’s
great to know that you all are
taking advantage of the
online tutoring and other
helpful advantages that AIMS
offers for you. This will make
a big difference for you in the
long run. Please continue to
take advantage of all that we
offer...we’re here for you!
Seniors, before you know it,
you’ll be walking across a
stage to receive your high
school diploma! This semester will go by so fast you’ll
almost blink and it will be
over. Please use AIMS as a
trusted resource to assist you

C O O R D I N A T O R ’ S
Happy New Year!!
Welcome back to the
wonderful world of
academics. I hope you all
had a fun and relaxing time
away. My holiday season
was fantastic and mainly
consisted of making sure
our new puppy didn’t do
anything he shouldn’t! I
was able to do some work
on our new house and play
around in my music studio
a bit. All in all, it was a
great break! But, it’s back
to work we all go—but
that’s a good thing. The
New Year is a perfect time
to make changes in your
life!
Please read the Newsletter
thoroughly as it contains
upcoming events and their

C O R N E R — A I M S

Lastly, please do not forget
your friends here at the
AIMS office—we are here
to help in any way we can.
After all, it’s our job!

in your preparation for life
after high school! If you are
planning to attend the Bridge
Summer Component. I MUST
have your paperwork
ASAP...that means yesterday!
We have to get you all admitted to Murray State and get
the ball rolling so you will
have classes scheduled.
Well...that’s it from me for
now. I celebrate another
year of life in a few days and
I’m excited to share it with
you all!
Thanks,

Stephen D. Keene

C O R N E R — A I M S

respective dates. For
example, the mandatory
Bridge and Academic Bowl
practice is on Saturday,
January 21st. If
transportation could be an
issue start thinking about it
now. If you can’t get
something worked out just
give us a call. Also, please
do not forget about
tutoring!! Start the year off
right by seeking help when
you need it. Don’t forget to
check at your school for
tutoring options as well as
the AIMS free live online
tutoring. Give me a shout if
you need more information.

I

“We don’t get a
chance to do that many
things, and every one
should be really
excellent. Because this
is our life…” — Steve
Jobs

Evan O’Neal

I I

T i m es

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C A R E E R

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P R O F I L E : G e t t i n g S c i e n c e
T h o s e W h o N e e d I t
to study neuroscience. Kreiner said he
wanted to figure out how the brain
worked. “Richard pulled a sea slug,
Aplysia californica, out of a salt water
tank and suggested to me that it
would be a good idea to start by understanding how a single neuron
works,” Kreiner says.

Thane Kreiner
Silicon Valley’s Thane Kreiner wants to
help a billion of the world’s poorest
people by 2020. Even by the standards of the region, home to many
change-the-world techies, that’s an
ambitious goal.
Kreiner moved to the Santa Clara University Center for Science, Technology,
and Society, where he has served as
executive director since September
2010, from the biotechnology industry, where he’d thrived for nearly 2
decades as a scientist, an executive,
and an entrepreneur. He says he has
now found his vocation, helping entrepreneurs use science and technology
to benefit underserved populations.
What’s more, he thinks he may be at
the vanguard of an increasingly viable
career alternative for those with
graduate training in science and engineering.
Thinking big, then thinking twice,
about bench science
Kreiner’s penchant for thinking big
was on display when he interviewed
for a spot in Stanford University’s neuroscience doctoral program in the
early 1980s. His first stop that day
was at the office of Richard Scheller,
who was an assistant professor in the
biology department; today he is an
executive vice president at Genentech.
Scheller asked Kreiner why he wanted

The sea slug was the model organism
for Kreiner’s thesis research, which
explored how cellular mechanisms
mediate simple behaviors and led to a
publication in Science. Kreiner finished his Ph.D. and left Stanford in
1988 for a postdoc position at the
University of California, Berkeley, en
route, he assumed, to a faculty position in academia.
But as he studied a tumor cell line
derived from mice, doubts about that
career path crept in. In the Bay Area
even more than in the rest of the
country, AIDS was dominating the
headlines. Kreiner had friends who
were dying of the disease. His work on
secretory pathways of AtT-20 cells
seemed esoteric. After a year of informational interviews in the biotechnology industry, he headed back to Stanford, this time to the business school.
He wanted a job where he “could apply science and technology to make a
real difference in people's lives.”
In 1993, between the first and second
years of his MBA program, Kreiner
interned at Affymetrix, a then-new
company that used technology from
the semiconductor industry to analyze
vast numbers of genes. Hopes ran
high that the company’s thumbnailsized "gene chips" would transform
medicine by making it easier, quicker,
and cheaper to scan a tissue sample
for a troublesome microorganism or a
disease-causing mutation. That same
year, the Human Genome Project

t o

wrapped up, sparking hope for rapid
advances in medicine.
Affymetrix cashed in on that hope and
a strong economy, growing rapidly.
Kreiner rose through the corporate
ranks, eventually reporting to Sue
Siegel, the company's president from
1998 to 2006. “Starting as a person
who really had never been in any other
corporation except Affymetrix, he grew
into a real business leader,” says
Siegel, who is now a prominent venture capitalist.
When Kreiner left Affymetrix in 2007,
as a senior vice president, the company’s revenues had passed $400
million. He could have had his pick of
plum biotech or venture capital jobs;
instead he followed another common
Silicon Valley script: He started three
companies in quick succession. But
already, he says, he was feeling dissatisfaction akin to what he had felt at
Berkeley 15 years earlier.
Biotechnology was having a huge impact, he realized, but it was being felt
mostly in developed countries, where
people were already well off. What
about people in the developing world?
He was content to put off answering
that question until later in his career -but when he saw the position at Santa
Clara, a 3600-student Jesuit university, he says, he knew it was time.
“The mission of Santa Clara is to create a more just, humane, and sustainable world,” Kreiner says. “I realized
that’s my mission, too, one that had
been building in me since my postdoc
years. And where there’s that strong of
a mission alignment, it’s hard to let
the opportunity go by.”

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A I M S

C A R E E R P R O F I L E : G e t t i n g S c i e n c e
T h o s e W h o N e e d I t ( C o n t i n u e d )
A new career path
Kreiner, who is 50, views his
role at Santa Clara as helping
people with science and engineering backgrounds move
into social entrepreneurship
early in their careers. For
decades, the archetypal experience for American students who wanted to help
poor people abroad was to
do a stint in the Peace Corps.
Kreiner believes that social
entrepreneurship offers an
alternative that's increasingly
viable -- and potentially more
impactful. It even has its own
Twitter hashtag, #socent.
As proof of the path's viability, Kreiner points to graduates of the Global Social
Benefit Incubator ( GSBI), a
10-month mentoring program
for social entrepreneurs,
which culminates in a 2-week
boot camp on the Santa
Clara campus every August
where participants present
business plans to Silicon
Valley entrepreneurs and
venture capitalists. Since
2003, more than 130 aspiring entrepreneurs have
passed through the program.
Most of their companies are
still operating. The 2011
class included entrepreneurs
working on clean energy,
mobile financial services, and
local video media projects
promoting social justice.
Lesley Silverthorn was among
the 2011 GSBI participants.
Her company, San Francisco
–based Angaza Design, sells

lighting and battery-charging
products in East Africa where
more than 30 million people
depend on costly and dangerous kerosene lamps. Angaza’s lighting system, which
includes a solar panel and an
LED light, is designed for
families living on $2 a day.
“Thane just seemed so into
it,” Silverthorn says, recalling
a speech Kreiner gave to kick
off the residency program.
“He said, ‘We’re here to help
you achieve scale. We want
each of you equipped to walk
out of here to change the
lives of 1 million people.' ”
Silverthorn’s career corroborates Kreiner's claim that
social entrepreneurship is a
viable career path for those
fresh from graduate science
or technology programs.
Silverthorn has two degrees
from Stanford, a bachelor’s
degree in product design and
a master’s in mechanical
engineering. Before starting
her company she worked on
the Amazon Kindle; her accounts of her time at Amazon
resemble Kreiner’s postdoc
laments: She was “stuck
designing a tiny switch that
was just one tiny component
of a larger system. It was not
super fulfilling,” she says.

a basic problem: These students’ counterparts abroad,
with training that’s just as
sound, will often do the same
work at a much lower cost.
But globalization has an upside. As Thomas Friedman
wrote in his 1 October 2011
New York Times column, “It
has never been harder to find
a job and never been easier -for those prepared for this
world -- to invent a job or find
a customer. Anyone with the
spark of an idea can start a
company overnight, using a
credit card, while accessing
brains, brawn and customers
anywhere.”

No going back

Silverthorn spent a year traveling through East African
villages to understand the
needs of her future customers. She now works with
manufacturing partners in
China while leading her company's sales and marketing
efforts. And she’s having the
time of her life. “With social
entrepreneurship, you're
seeing the results of your
toils directly affecting peoples' lives,” she says. “That
feeling, it's really hard to give
up, and I couldn't really see
myself going back to a large
corporation and just focusing
on another U.S. consumer
electronic device.”

Much has been made of the
fact that in the age of globalization, it’s increasingly difficult to attract U.S. students
to science and engineering
studies and careers. There's

There’s no going back for
Kreiner either. He’s not backing away from his eyecatching goal of helping a
billion people in the developing world. “Look, since 2003,

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the ventures coming
through the GSBI have
affected 74 million people,” he says. His staff
members are considering
replicating the program at
other Jesuit universities, a
network that includes several hundred campuses
worldwide. To achieve his
goal, “We’re talking about
a 13-fold increase in 10
years,” he says.
That growth rate, he says,
is low by Silicon Valley
standards. Facebook grew
from 20 million users in
2007 to more than 800
million users today, a 40fold increase in 4 years.
“When I walk through this
and talk about the huge
needs and the great work
these entrepreneurs are
doing, people aren’t telling
me my goal is crazy anymore.”

Geoffrey Koch is a
writer in Portland, Oregon
10.1126/
science.caredit.a1200002

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P A R E N T S C O R N E R :
I n v o l v e m e n t i n
When a parent gets involved in his
child's education, he positively influences his child's chances of success. Kids whose parents are involved in their education tend to
perform better than their peers who
have uninvolved parents. Some parents may not know how to get involved in their child's education, but
once they do, they can make a big
difference. Parents and school personnel need to work together to ensure positive parental involvement
for every child.
Types
There are several types of parental
involvement in education. Parents
can become involved in their child's
education through simple steps such
as asking the child about her day or
monitoring her homework assignments. Parents can schedule conferences with the teacher or other
school leaders to keep updated
about the child's progress and they
can attend school functions like
sporting events and award ceremonies.
Another way for parents to stay involved in their child's education is
to set expectations for their child. If
parents want their children to be
successful in school, they need to
expect their children to perform at
their best effort at all times.

A b o u t P a r e n t
E d u c a t i o n

should be less pronounced. The second factor is the parents' belief that
they can have a positive impact on
their child's education. Some parents think their child will perform a
certain way in school regardless of
their involvement, while others understand that if they involve themselves in their child's education it
will positively impact their child's
educational performance. The third
factor is the degree to which the
parent feels the child and school
want parental involvement. Some
parents feel their child wants them
to stay away from their education or
leave them alone; other parents may
not feel welcome at their child's
school, keeping them from being
more involved in their child's education.
Impact
The Michigan Department of Education lists a variety of ways that
parental involvement impacts a
child's education. Citing the National Parent Teacher Association,
they state that when parents are involved in a child's education, the
child will achieve higher grades,
better attendance, increased selfesteem and motivation, fewer disciplinary problems and have a lower
chance of becoming involved with
drugs and alcohol.
School Involvement

Factors
According to the Michigan Department of Education, the level of parental involvement in education
relies on three main factors. The
first is the parents' understanding of
what is important or appropriate in
terms of their involvement at
school. Some parents may believe
that they need to monitor every aspect of their child's education while
others may believe that their role

Schools must actively recruit parent
involvement if they want parent
involvement. School leaders can
invite parents to special events, informational workshops, and even
school lunches. Teachers should
provide regular communciation to
parents in terms of grade reports,
behavior updates and class events.
Teachers need to give positive and
negative feedback about student
grades and behavior and also offer

productive options for what parents
can do to be more involved.
Obstacles
According to the Michigan Department of Education, programs specifically tailored to involving parents at school tend to decline as the
students get older. Schools invite
parents of elementary students to
regular events including classroom
parties, award ceremonies and
school fundraisers. These types of
events decline as a child gets older,
which means that the parent involvement in education also declines. Another obstacle they describe is that teachers sometimes do
not believe that single parents or
low-income parents have as much
time as married or upper-class parents have to spend with their children. Therefore they do not make as
much effort to involve the single
and low-income parents.

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AIMS STAFF
Dr. Doris Sarr,
Director AIMS I & II—
dclarksarr@murraystate.edu

A D V E N T U R E S
I N
M A T H
&
S C I E N C E

Stephen D. Keene,
Coordinator—AIMS I—
skeene@murraystate.edu

240 Blackburn Science Building
Murray, KY 42071
Phone: 1-877-424-6777
Fax: 270-809-4351
E-mail: www.murraystate.edu/aims

Evan O’Neal,
Coordinator— AIMS II—
eoneal@murraystate.edu
Gail Woolridge,
Administrative Assistant—
gwoolridge@murraystate.edu

SCHEDULE
January
16th Martin Luther King Jr. Day
21st Mandatory Bridge Workshop II/
AIMS Spring Workshop
10:00am—1:00pm
31st
AIMS Cultural Event
Spamalot –Luther F. Carson Center
5:00pm Dinner—TBA

28th

18th KY TRiO Day at Berea College
25th –29th 40th Annual SAEOPP
Conference

June

April
TBA

AIMS Spring College Tour

GL ANCE

May
29th

16th AIMS Application Deadline

A

21 AIMS Summer Orientation
9:00am – 12:00pm
251 Blackburn Science Building
27th
AIMS Cultural Event
Boyz II Men—Luther F. Carson Center
5:00 Dinner—TBA

February

March

AT

st

JANUARY BIRTHDAYS
Ginette Bess
Aalecia Crittendon
Tinesha Johnson
Stephen Keene

2:00pm – 4:00pm
Bridge 2012 Move-In Day
Summer Classes Begin

1st – 3rd Bridge Weekend
10th
Undergraduate Move-In Day
27th
Bridge Graduation
28th
Cultural Extravaganza
29th
Closing Symposium
29th – July 3rd End of Summer Trip

Tre Siples
Alexandria Taylor
Alexis Taylor